Month: August 2023

Neat little trick – Viewing negatives on a smartphone.

Following on from yesterdays post regarding fogging on negatives. If you remember I’ve lost the mask for my scanner so I’m currently unable to utilise this service.

The Negatives waiting to be scanned

However I had some time and took to the internet to find out if there was a way to view in the short term until I found the mask for the scanner. It appears the phone you have in your hand can more than likely do the deed without having to down load any apps.

Now I have an iPhone, however the same is also available on Android but I’ll stick to the iPhone route. It’s all about inverting colours

Firstly venture to settings, Accessibility, Accessibility shortcut and then choose classic invert. A tick will appear by your choice and then just come back out to the Home Screen. Now every time you triple click on the side home button the screen colours will invert.

Standard
Inverted

Now if off you triple click again the colours go back to standard. Well I’ve tried this on the same negatives above from yesterday and it gives you a good idea of what you are going to get. These pictures are direct inverts of the negatives at the top of this post with no cropping or adjustments, I just wanted you to see the possibilities you have available to you in your hand. If you use a light box and some glass I’m sure you’d get quite acceptable results.

Negatives all inverted

Great little tool for those old negatives you have laying around that you were thinking of getting printed but weren’t quite sure.

Have a lovely day, thanks for passing by.

Halina A1 Reflex – Test roll, it’s foggy out !

Hey hey, I’m back. Well, after my previous rant I thought it best to get back to normal or as normal as can be achieved so here we go.

If you remember a few posts back I took on an old Halina A1 Reflex cheapo camera from the 60s. It was in a bit of a state and had seen better days. It had a full refurbishment with lens fungus removed, shutter mechanism repaired and a new leatherette finish put in place to tart it up. It looked quite nice and I was quite pleased with the outcome.

Halina A1 Reflex and exposed 120 film

However that is all well if you want to use it as display piece or a bookend, but I wanted to see it work.

Over the last few weeks I’ve had a roll of 120 B/W film (Rollei 100 RPX) sitting in it using it once in a while whenever the weather was right, and light conditions sufficed. Seeing that I’d replaced the light seals I wanted to check whether there were any issues there and as a result of todays development of the roll this could be an issue.

Paterson tank

When exposing I’ve forgotten to wind on a couple of times, but in general i seem to have got it right. The wind on is ok and the displays in the window are visible. Barring some double exposures the settings on the lens seem to have done their job, I seem to have set both lenses up correctly so I’m happy with that.

The film has an over all visible darkness that points to fogging. I think I might be responsible for this to be honest, I was a bit too impatient to get the roll loaded into the Paterson tank, I had a duvet over my head but the strong summer light was evident for the first time in ages in the East Midlands, and I shouldn’t be able to see the developer spiral….but I did briefly. Not good.

You can see the background fog

That being a problem I really do need to run another film through the camera to 100% check the light seals and then develop in the appropriate conditions.

I was silly here but another lesson learned. Be patient, don’t rush things and just do things properly.

I’m pleased the camera works, I’ll be able to get some pictures off the negatives and what I can see through a Lupe looks promising.

My 120 mask on my scanner has gone missing, so the pictures might be a little while before they make an appearance. I have another roll of film though so I’ll get that in the camera this week and get busy, and when it’s dark I’ll develop the film….properly

Have a wonderful day everyone thank you for passing by, stay safe and smile it uses less muscles than a frown 😂